A special election for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will begin on September 1st, 2006; Wikimedians will have the opportunity to choose one or more individuals to represent Wikimedia contributors from around the world. Members of the Board of Trustees are entrusted with the ultimate decision making for the Wikimedia Foundation.

At least one position will be available during this election; additional positions may be added by the Board before the start of the election. The exact number of available seats will be announced before the start of the election by the Election Officials (Note: for further information on this part, see August's 14th announcement).

The election will use approval voting through the Boardvote software. Each voter will be allowed to vote for as many of the candidates as they see fit for each position; the candidate(s) with the most votes will be declared elected. In the event of a tie, a run-off election will be announced.

Interested candidates should complete an entry form on Meta starting on 00:00, 2006 August 1 (UTC) and ending 23:59 August 28, 2006 (UTC). Late entries will not be allowed. To be accepted as a candidate, you must be eligible to vote in the election. (See the voter qualifications below.) Additionally, you must make your real name known and must be at least 18 years of age.

Candidates will have up to three weeks to present themselves to the rest of the Wikimedia community though a candidate statement. Translation coordinators will translate the candidate statements into a number of languages before the beginning of the election.

To be eligible to vote, users must have been a contributor to at least one Wikimedia project for 90 days prior to August 1, 2006, as indicated by the date of the user's first edit, and must have completed at least 400 edits with the same account by August 1, 2006.

Users may not "combine" edits from different projects to reach 400: they must have 400 on a single project, and the first edit with that account must have been made not less than 90 days before August 1, 2006.

The time-line for this year's election:

Candidate entries:

Begins on Tuesday, 0:00 August 1, 2006 (UTC)

Ends on Monday, 23:59 August 28, 2006 (UTC)

Voting:

Begins on Friday, 0:00 September 1, 2006 (UTC)

Ends on Thursday, 23:59 September 21, 2006 (UTC)

If you speak a language other than English, your help in translating this note and posting it to the Wikimedia projects in your language(s) would be appreciated. Once you have done so, please notify us on Meta at Election translations 2006.

August's 17th notice

Dear candidates,
thank you for your cooperation. We the Election Officials are now going to the next step: your candidacy confirmation.

As the way to reach you most surely and confidentially, we have chosen e-mail, precisely via wikimedia meta mail. Please make it sure for now if your mail address preferences on meta has been already properly authenticated. Further information about confirmation will be provided to you by email from one of us via meta e-mail.

If you have no contact from us until the next Monday, please mail us. In that case, we recommend you to use the same email address you set for your meta mail, we'll try to reach you in our all efforts though.

September 1's notice

Hello Wikimedians,
We the Election Officials hereby clarify how votes from blocked accounts will be treated. This is not overruling anything previous, in our opinion, but is rather writing down of oral tradition of Election Officials. In the current Board Election, the Election Officials will count the votes from blocked users as follows:

1. Users indefinitely banned or blocked from any Wikimedia project may not vote in the Wikimedia Foundation Board elections. This means they may not vote using the blocked account or from any other account they may hold on a Wikimedia project.

2. Users temporarily banned or blocked from any Wikimedia project may not vote from the blocked or banned account for the duration it is blocked. However, they may vote from any other project on which they are eligible to vote, or they may vote after their block either expires or is removed if the election is still open.

3. Election officials may strike votes from users who do not meet the eligibility criteria described above. Officials may find disqualified voters by searching manually, by technical filtering (to be provided by developer(s) if possible), or by third-party reports (see the below).

4. Any Wikimedia user is invited to report questionable votes to the Election Officials. To ensure the authenticity of the reports, we highly recommend that bureaucrats or admins of a local wiki make the reports, and we appreciate the assistance of local wiki admins in checking such questionable votes. Admins of local wikis are welcome to report on projects other than the ones on which they are administrators; however, local admins are expected to be the most reliable source of such information.

Thank you for your input and ideas on this issue. We hope all eligible voters participate in the coming election starting September 1!